I'm Shanna Lang. I'm 28, I'm a veterinary technician at an animal hospital in Spokane, Washington, and I play first base for the Lilac City Lightning in a women's slow-pitch league on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I have held down a growling Rottweiler for a nail trim and I have taken a line drive off the shin, and neither one scares me as much as the week Xena went off the air for the summer.

I've watched since the very first week in September 1995. I'd seen her on Hercules the spring before, when she was still the villain, and I told my roommate that woman needed her own show. By September, there she was. I'm not saying I had anything to do with it.

This page is my scrolls, the way Gabrielle keeps hers. Read them in order or don't. Gabrielle would want you to read them in order.

Here is the whole show in two sentences. Xena did terrible things when she was young, and she has decided to spend the rest of her life making up for them. Gabrielle believes she can, and on the days Xena doesn't believe it herself, that's enough.

I grew up watching women on TV who were somebody's wife or somebody's secretary or somebody's murder victim. Xena rides her own horse, picks her own fights and saves herself. She's also funny and moody and wrong sometimes, which made her a person instead of a poster. And Gabrielle started out a farm girl who talked too much and grew up, over four years, into a woman who can handle a staff and stand her ground and still, mostly, believe the best of people. I don't know another show that's let a character grow that much.

Mostly it's about two women who would die for each other and very nearly have, several times. I've got a best friend like that. Not many people do. The show makes me grateful for mine.

Lucy Lawless is from New Zealand, where the show is filmed, and she is the reason it works. She can do the fights, the jokes and the heartbreak in the same scene. In October 1996 she was rehearsing a comedy bit on horseback for The Tonight Show in Burbank when the horse fell, and she broke her pelvis. The show worked around her for a few weeks, including a body-switch story that let Hudson Leick carry things for a while, and Lucy was back much sooner than anybody expected. Then in the fall of 1997 she went to New York and played Rizzo in Grease on Broadway for about seven weeks. I couldn't get there. A girl from my league did, and she said Lucy could sing and she said it about four hundred times. Lucy married Rob Tapert, one of the show's producers, last year.

Renee O'Connor is a Texan, and she has the hardest job on the show: she has to make a sidekick into a hero over four seasons, one episode at a time, without anybody noticing the moment it happened. She did it. Her comic timing is the most underrated thing on television, and she got very, very good with that staff.

Joxer (Ted Raimi). The self-appointed mighty warrior who is neither. Half the fans I know can't stand him. I love him. He's brave in the way only someone who has no business being there can be brave, and he's hopelessly devoted to Gabrielle, who is patient with him in a way I'm not sure I could be.

Ares (Kevin Smith). The god of war, all leather and smirk, who keeps trying to get Xena to come back and be his warlord. He's the devil on her shoulder, and he is very good-looking about it. Xena keeps saying no. I respect her for it more every time.

Callisto (Hudson Leick). The best villain on the show, maybe on TV. When Callisto was a little girl, Xena's army burned her village, and Callisto grew up into exactly what Xena made her. That's what makes her terrifying: she's Xena's past with a face. Hudson Leick plays her laughing, and it's the scariest laugh I've ever heard.

I get more e-mail about this than about anything else on the page, so here's my answer, once.

Some fans see Xena and Gabrielle as more than friends. The fans call it the subtext, and the show has certainly given people plenty to talk about. Other fans see the best friendship ever put on television and nothing else. I have friends on my team on both sides of that, and we have argued about it over pizza after more than one game.

Here's where I come down. What those two have is love. You can call it whatever kind of love makes sense to you, and I won't tell you you're wrong. The show is big enough for all of us, and so is this page. The only answer I won't accept is the one that makes fun of anybody for theirs. Mail that's unkind about it goes in the recycle bin, unanswered.

Every softball player I know has made one of these in her head. If the Lightning could suit up the whole show for one game against the league champs, here's how I'd fill out the card. Connie, our coach, says I've given this more thought than our real lineup. Connie is right.

Bench: Salmoneus, running the concession stand at a substantial markup. Mascot: Argo. Coach: Ares asked. We said no.